THE NEXT GENERATION

Meet the Elon Musk fans remaking education in his image.

- By Anna Merlan

THIS PAST WINTER, as Education Secretary Linda McMahon said her department's "final mission" would be to shift education programs "back to the states," the agency was stripped to the bone, dismantled by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

The attack didn't come out of nowhere: For years, the right's megarich have bankrolled efforts to weaken public education by supporting voucher initiatives to pull funding from local schools and their unionized teachers. The DOGE cuts have supercharged the effort, creating unprecedented opportunities for private interests to profit while hastening the destruction of public education and remaking how society shapes young minds.

"Generally," Musk has said, "you want education to be as close to a video game as possible." Now, as his proteges lay havoc to the federal government and push for critical functions to be replaced with Al, a different group of his acolytes is poised to take advantage of the chaos DOGE unleashed and do the same thing in classrooms around America.

Among them are Joshua Dahn and Chrisman Frank, co-founders of Synthesis Tutor, an Al-driven, "superhuman" tutoring program that claims to "turn math into hands-on play." But Synthesis' self-described "revolution in math learning" seems to go far beyond arithmetic; Frank has said his mission is to "replace entire functions of the teacher" and supplant educators with Al.

"The vast majority of teachers are glorified babysitters," Frank, who unsurprisingly doesn't appear to have a teaching background, tweeted in 2024. "It is insane to trust the local babysitter to teach kids cognitive skills that may in many cases be beyond the teacher." (Synthesis didn't respond to a request for comment.)